Democrats now less popular than Trump, GOP and mainstream media

President Donald Trump may tweet too much, but his approval ratings are higher than those of the media and the opposition Democrats, a new poll has shown. The results are ringing alarm bells among some liberals.

A USA Today/Suffolk University poll, conducted in the first week of March, shows Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent, and his personal favorability at 45 percent. Sixty percent of respondents disapprove of his temper, and 59 percent think he tweets too much.

While USA Today called Trump’s approval “a poor rating by historic standards,” the numbers looked even worse for his opponent in the November 2016 presidential election and the opposition Democratic Party: Hillary Clinton recorded only a 35 percent approval rating, while the Democrats were at 36 percent.

“This is a disaster. At a time when Donald Trump is the least liked president ever measured at this point in his first term, the Democratic Party has found a way to be even less liked than him. This is how Donald Trump wins a second term,”progressive activist Shaun King wrote in the New York Daily News on Thursday.

The Democratic party “struggles to hear the truth about itself,” King added, and pointed out that most Democrats he spoke with could not tell him what the party stands for.

Last month, the Democrats elected former Labor Secretary Tom Perez as their new National Committee chair. Perez was backed by Clinton and former President Barack Obama, while his principal rival, Rep. Keith Ellison (R-Minnesota) enjoyed the support of the left wing of the party, led by independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

The party’s poor showing in the Suffolk poll is even more significant when considering that the sample of 1,000 registered voters included 352 Democrats, 330 Republicans and 318 independents.

Broken down by party affiliation, Trump’s approval rating is much higher among Republicans (88 percent) and is higher than disapproval among independents by 2 percentage points. More Democrats (11 percent) approve of Trump than Republicans disapprove (8 percent).

Former Democratic US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton

A whopping 93 percent of Republicans, 61 percent of independents, and even 15 percent of Democrats have an unfavorable view of Hillary Clinton, while slightly more independents (57 percent) disapprove of Democrats than of Republicans (51 percent).

While the respondents mostly disagreed (59 percent) with Trump’s description of journalists as “enemies of the people,” the majority of Republicans (78 percent) and independents (56 percent) had an unfavorable view of the media, along with 19 percent of Democrats.

Most of the respondents disapproved of Trump’s temperament (60 percent) and thought he was tweeting too much (59 percent), but 55 percent agreed that he has “shown leadership” and 46 percent believe the country is headed in the right direction – a 12-point swing up from the same poll in December 2016.